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Thursday, April 14, 2011

Fashionably late: The 116th Four Stone hearth.

I know I’m late, so let us don’t waste any more time with weird stories how I managed to completely forget that I canceled my Internet-contract a few months ago, leaving me in a completely Internet-less home and therefore making such mundane tasks like reading Blogs a pretty complicated and time consuming issue.

So instead, let us concentrate on more important things, like Anthropology and Blogs and what happens if you combine those two things. Personal submissions were nonexistent this time, so I dug around and tried to gather all the interesting stuff I can find.

It’s interesting to see how the most popular story of the last two weeks intertwines with the saddest news this week, as Lewis Binford, the “inventor” of Archeological middle range-theory, died this Monday. Christina Killgrove at (Bone Girl) wrote a nice obituary and although I'm not very interested in Archeology, the news of Binford's death really affected me.I first heard of Binford’s work as I read Robert Foleys “Just another unique species” where he adapts Binford’s middle Range theory to evolutionary model-building. I still keep this theory in the back of my mind when I try to think about a proper approach to scientific modeling in Paleoanthropology.

On the front of behavioural studies, there are two Posts worth to be mentioned.

I’m happy, that there’s at least one Post which deals with primates in this weeks edition:

Jason Goldman, wrote about a study dealing with contagenious yawning in Chimpanzees."Sleeping or empathic: What does yawning mean?"I yawn a lot, so this is a story in which I’m naturally interested, although I have some problems with the study itself. But on the other hand, I have Problems with almost every behavioural study. But I think, there are some nice things to discuss in this Post.

The next one already is pretty dusty, but it’s my favourite Post so far in this year and I think everyone in the world should read it. "Evolution: What it is and why humans aren't immune to it." by Zaccharoo over at Lawn Chair Anthropology. Probably one of the best summaries on the general principles of evolutionary theory I’ve read so far.

I wasn’t the only one who had his birthday in the last days. In fact, “This is serious monkey business” turned One year old a week ago and celebrated this event with a collection of its most popular posts. So, if you haven’t already stopped by, do it right now.

That's it for this week. I really hope you enjoy this edition and I really hope, I'd be able to host another one sometime soon. The next edition (April 27th) is still vacant, so if anybody wants to fill in this position, just tell Krystal D'Acosta.

Let me close this edition with the only funny photograph of an Ape I got (I really need a bigger collection of those).

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Dunja, a female Orang-Utan of the Leipzig-Zoo, probably commenting the request of some visitor to "do something".The Photograph was taken sometime around 2008/2009 by "David B." a good friend of mine and excellent Photographer.

Who am I?

I'm an undergraduate student of Anthropology, Biology and Psychology at the University of Mainz in Germany.

My interests are: Primate and human Evolution; the evolution of human behaviour, Taxonomy and Systematics, Evolutionary theory, philosophy of science, epistemiology and any other field that helps us to understand our own species.